Israeli biochemist Ada E. Yonath has studied ribosomes, large complex molecule that synthesizes protein, work which earned her the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz). She was the first scientist to observe and unravel the internal architecture of a large ribosomal subunit, and she developed a new methodology called cryocrystallography or the "cryo technique", in which protein crystals are rapid-frozen to reduce radiation damage caused by previous X-ray crystallography methods.